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OpenStack celebrates its second birthday with ARM clouds

OpenStack, the open source cloud platform initially founded by NASA and Rackspace, is celebrating its second birthday today. Even though NASA has since bowed out of the project, OpenStack has been able to attract support from a total of 180 commercial entities, which is about the same as the number of companies contributing to the Linux kernel. OpenStack achieved this growth of commercial contributors in roughly one tenth of the time it took Linux.

The OpenStack project is currently preparing for its next release in September, code-named "Folsum". The current version is OpenStack "Essex", which debuted in April. The company is aware of more than one hundred deployments, which include customers such as HP, AT&T and Deutsche Telekom. Companies contributing to the project include Red Hat, IBM, Canonical, SUSE, Dell, Intel, AMD and Yahoo!.

Coinciding with its anniversary, OpenStack announced that its TryStack.org service has a new bank of servers available, which runs entirely on ARM-based hardware. TryStack is a community-sponsored testing deployment of OpenStack that provides a sandbox environment for individuals who want to test the project free of charge and without much setup overhead.

According to John Mao from Calxeda, writing in the announcement on the OpenStack blog, the plan for this deployment is to eventually create one big server pool with an OpenStack installation that spans both x86 and ARM servers and to make using it seamless for end users. The goal is to make OpenStack itself as architecture agnostic as possible. Users who want to try out OpenStack running on ARM-based servers can sign up for a free account on the TryStack web site.